Seven Red

Now that Part 1 has managed to alienate everyone in my field (as part of my unending quest to begin a second career), it’s time to turn to the Top 20 CCCC Presentation Mistakes, Part 2. Just so you know that I know, this list demonstrates that I am a remarkably ungenerous jackass who probably doesn’t belong in any teaching situation, since the cynicism disease has apparently eaten my nurturing gene. Or something. I get it. And yet, here we go:

11. The Concept Stew – This presentation is usually not bad, and can’t really be characterized as a “mistake.” It just is what it is; I’m just still trying to figure out what it is. The Concept Stew is really a content issue, and goes something like this:

We all know X set of concepts that we usually use to think about Y subject. Definition of concept X1, definition of concept X2, definition of concept X3. These are derived from acknowledged theorists in our field. However, they are actually inadequate for thinking about Y because blah blah blah. Luckily, these other people in a thoroughly unrelated field have developed Z set of concepts that might help us. Definition of concept Z1, definition of concept Z2, definition of concept Z3. Look what happens when we apply concept Z1-3 on Y case study A. We should consider using these Z concepts to think about Y in the future.

There’s something endearing about The Concept Stew, and I’ll admit that I’ve done a bit of stewing myself. It’s even lovely, and often smart, and it’s far better than almost anything else on this list. I guess my only complaint is that it seems pretty easy, and that Z set of concepts often fits so neatly that it seems suspicious, a level of suspicion that generally increases with the distance of rhetoric and writing instruction from the field that produces the Z concepts. I’m quite sure that the economic concept of the information cascade has rhetorical cognates, so to speak, so it’s not clear why we need one and not the other. That and nobody ever follows through on the use of Z concepts but perhaps the presenter, which makes it essentially advertising.

12. The Technophile – I see you there messing around with your brand new MacBook Pro. You’ve got the A/V hook-up working, and you’re testing out the video. You even brought those portable speakers so that we hear the audio clearly. Good. I’m the last person to complain about a little tech stuff at the presentation. But why, why I ask you, must the video be longer than your explanation of why I’m supposed to care about it? Why must it be a video that I could have easily seen by checking my Digg RSS feed last week? What does it tell us about writing, rhetoric, communication, language, or culture? Let me explain something to you, friend. At its very heart, our entire profession is predicated on the notion that the thing does NOT speak for itself. Like, ever. By the “thing,” I mean your video of the guy riding the BMX bike around a city I presume to be Miami while Biggie’s “Juicy” thumps in the background. Prefacing the video by saying “I want to show a video of vernacular literacies” doesn’t help me. You might be awed by the multimodality of it all, but I’m here wondering why Christmas missed us. I’m perfectly happy to see kickass demonstrations of what the MacBook can do. There’s an Apple store on Michigan Avenue. Hell, there’s one in Skokie.

13. The Airport Special – Your group is set to present Friday morning. When you contact the other speakers on Wednesday night, one seems a little frazzled. He or she agrees to meet you for dinner, but looks preoccupied. “How’s the talk?” you ask, and your co-panelist mumbles something about “finishing touches,” then excuses him or herself early. You know what this means: The Airport Special. Your co-panelist was going to write the presentation last weekend, but stuff came up, so then it was Monday, then Tuesday. Then the calculations began: how many hours is my lay-over in Minneapolis? I can write it then! Well, no, but on the plane: I’ll bring a legal pad and write it then! Some initial ideas are sketched out. Well, I have all of Thursday, right? No, not really. On Thursday night, your co-panelist begs off dinner altogether: you see a laptop and a stack of books piled up on the hotel desk; you note an increasingly frantic movement in your co-panelist’s eyes. Needless to say, anybody who has ever gone to graduate school has composed eight coherent, smart, and well-informed double-spaced pages in a very short time more than once, but there’s something about the looming audience that freezes people. Note to Airport Specialists: we can tell.

14. The Brave One – The Brave One is a really a sub-species of the Airport Special, but it is different enough to warrant its own description. Where the Airport Specialist usually comes up with some half-baked presentation to muddle through, the Brave One’s speaker has decided to throw caution to the wind and just wing it. In my experience, the Brave One presenters are usually closely associated with true geniuses who can just wing it, and are therefore under the false impression that they can do the same. But, as we all know, association is not identity, so those bullet-point lists that constitutes their presentations don’t really cut it, and their improvisations – which seemed so coherent when they rehearsed them briefly in the five minutes before the panel – break down in a fit of sweating, hemming, hawing, umming, and grasping. I’ve been on two panels with Brave One presenters, one who went first, and one who went last. In each case, the Brave One poisons the audience so thoroughly that your own flawless and insightful presentation (that’s right, I said it!) is adjudicated guilty by association. Where the Brave One goes first, half the room evacuates after his or her presentation, rightly suspecting that the next two presentations will be more of the same; where the Brave One goes last, the questioners snarl out irritated diatribes. It’s ugly. Don’t do it.

15. The And-Another-Thing – As the excruciating minutes tick away, you realize that you’ve entered a space-time vortex, where all relation to the typical sense of duration has melted like a surrealist clock. You’re experiencing the And-Another-Thing. The presentation in this case might be relatively good on its own. It’s well-shaped, with signposts, content, and moderately compelling evidence. The problem is that the presenter, under the sway of some unstudied psychological condition, has lost basic time-consciousness, and now exists in a space-time completely determined by the contents of his or her memory. Put another way, if he or she has anything left in memory, the presentation will continue. It goes without saying that such memory dumps appear in the form of asides, and connect to each other in purely additive ways, a feature of the presentation most manifest in the use of its sudden transition statements: “And another thing…” The audience for the And-Another-Thing will often be fooled by the announcement that the presenter is concluding, which is usually signaled thusly: “I’ll finish up on this note…” Everybody’s been waiting desperately for this statement, so it’s not surprising that they would take it as definitive. Don’t. It’s a red herring. The announcement of the conclusion only signals that the longest portion of the presentation is now at hand: the presenter must empty everything from memory starting at that point. “And another thing” now begins to interlace with “And by the way,” leading to a web of additions and side-notes, the open-ended nature of which leads even reasonable people to fear that the presentation will, in fact, never end, and that perhaps they actually died in the moments immediately before entering the room, and that this is their eternal recompense for a life spent at sinful and disturbing debauchery. Hell is other people’s digressions…

BONUS ADVICE for the FELLAS: Hey guys. I know you may not understand the ins-and-outs of buying slacks, never having been through the ringer of the 20-something business environment, where every young salesguy and financial analyst reads GQ as a matter of basic protection from scathing ridicule. For this reason, I want to gently steer you in a particular direction. When you are buying slacks for your “dress-up” occasions (like, say, presentations), be advised that you have to make a number of decisions, about material, cuff-style, and – most deadly – pleat. Avoid the pleat. Avoid the double pleat. For God’s sake avoid the triple pleat. Repeat: No triple pleat. In general, if you’re expecting to pay between $50 and $100 for something, and you find it for $13.99, there’s probably a reason. Also, if your shoe has a steel toe, it can’t really be categorized as a dress shoe. Steel toe shoes are designed to protect the wearer from falling cinder blocks and the like; I don’t think dropping your PowerPoint presentation qualifies as legitimately dangerous. Just sayin’.

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